


quietly how you'll stay

by zychek



Category: Hunger Games (2012), Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/M, so i just have lots of feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-29
Updated: 2012-03-29
Packaged: 2017-11-02 16:16:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/370930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zychek/pseuds/zychek
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gale knows what is going to happen before anyone else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	quietly how you'll stay

  


Gale’s father was a miner.

Most of the men in Lower District Twelve are miners, working deep in the ground to dig up rich coal from the long line of it that runs through their town. There’s a reason their end is called the Seam, and it’s not because of the clothing.

No, it’s not that at all, and Gale has known it since the day his father went down into the mines and his mantle landed on Gale’s shoulders when the debris came tumbling out.

 

 

That was the first time he saw the Katniss he knows now – tiny and belligerent, glaring freely at anyone who looked her way – clutching the useless medal that was supposed to replace their fathers, that was supposed to repair their families.

 

 

When Gale is fifteen, Katniss meets him at their usual spot and looks him up and down with assessing eyes. He blinks back at her, notes her new single braid, the familiar colour of her skin – the same as his own – her collarbones prominent at the lapels of her jacket, sharp wrists at the end of her sleeves.

He doesn’t know her well enough to read her look yet, only knows it’s the same one she gives both prey in the sights of her bow, and the men at the Hob who’d take more than she wants to sell. And doesn’t Gale still have scars on his knuckles from the first – and second and third – time _that_ had come up in the hall. The fourth time, skinny little Catnip had held his arm back, her hand caught tight in the crook of his elbow, and levelled the man herself, legs sweeping out his knees and her pointed bony elbows catching his middle as he fell. The surprise on his face is one of Gale’s favourite memories.

In the sudden quiet of the Hob, she had crouched calmly by his chest and pushed her knife to his throat, leaned in tight and given him a very short warning.

Gale had never been prouder to stand by her side, but when he doesn’t shiver under her gaze and she hands him a bow, he doesn’t have the words to say _thank you_ like he wants to.

He teaches her a new snare instead.

 

 

The few months before she turns sixteen, they have a particularly good run in the forest, and both their families have a little more to go around than years just past. Katniss soaks up the food and sunlight; the wet rain the evenings, smiling wide as she scrambles up trees in the forest, easily taunting Gale, who is too heavy to come up after her, now. (Sometimes, she plucks nuts off the high branches and drops them on his head. He laughs, and waits until they’re drinking from the stream to push her in.)

She starts to look a little less like a twig with hair, and a little more like a woman with knives in her belt.

Gale is not ashamed to admit to himself that he likes it, but it begins to irritate him when he notices the other boys paying attention as well. He suffers no delusions that she somehow _belongs_ to him (she, like the cat in both her names, belongs to no-one but herself, and likely never truly will), but he is the one who knew her before; who saw himself in a tiny girl in the forest, skittering around doing whatever she could for a family that had no other options but a useless copper medal and memories.  Most of the boys from the Seam know how Gale feels about her well enough – and all are able to see that she cares only for him if she cares for anyone beyond her sister – though the Baker’s son follows her with the hungriest eyes.

Were it not for the fact his father is both sentimental in his haggling and a regular customer – for squirrel, of all things – Gale would take pains to let the boy know how ridiculous an idea it is to follow Katniss Everdeen with longing.

She never looks back.

 

 

There are other girls, of course. Gale is not unaware of his appearance or his strength, and is not unwilling when easy fun is on the table. He has Catnip sometimes, yes, but they have no life to lead – only stagnant waiting as they run through the forest – until they’re both old enough to escape the reach of the Hunger Games. Two more years for him, four for her, as their odds dwindle to feed their families.

 

He can wait; she isn’t going anywhere (none of them are).

 

 

She is the single most determined person he has ever met – thinks he _will_ ever meet.

He has known Katniss Everdeen since the moment she was born; stepping forward on a stage to accept a medal in place of her father, quietly vibrating with an anger that looked so harsh it might burn when she stepped around her unmoving mother, who could do nothing but stare into the middle distance, hands resting lightly on her youngest’s bright hair.

Gale had stood beside his own mother, younger brothers clinging to his legs, and watched the tiny girl with razor grey eyes push her anger down, fold it away inside herself, and reach out to take the circle of engraved copper from the official at the centre of the stage.

Since that day, and soon after – when he found a whispering Catnip in the woods staring wistfully at his traps – Gale has watched Katniss. Has watched her fold in all her anger and fury and hate, disappointment and resentment and _hunger_ , and use it to fuel the fire inside that keeps her going. There are times, though, when he wonders at her – curious as to how is hasn’t done her harm yet, having all that building heat and pressure from _too many things_ they can’t _do or see or touch or taste or_ have.

Then he looks at her and sees his Catnip; she keeps going.

 

 

Then an Everdeen is called to the Hunger Games.

 

 

Gale thinks he knows what is going to happen before anyone else. Before Prim, certainly, and when he looks at Katniss she’s got such a look of shock on her face that he knows before her too. He knows Katniss, and he’s moving as she is, coming to take Prim as everything else falls into place inside his head.

An Everdeen has been called. Katniss has been called at the Reaping. Because she didn’t have twenty entries, she had twenty-one; the last one was just spelled slightly differently. Katniss has been called by the Reaping to fight to the death in the Hunger Games.

But Gale knows Katniss Everdeen in the way that nobody else does. He has watched her fold everything inside herself; make it _hot_ and _hard_.

 

 

Gale’s father was a miner. He knows all about coal. He knows it comes from all manner of dead, decaying things; that ordinarily, it can be crushed into dust that sticks in the lungs and underneath fingernails and all over skin.

He knows what happens to coal when nature adds heat and pressure.

Diamonds.

He knows that there is nothing harder on earth. There is nothing that can damage them. There is _nothing_.

Gale knows Katniss Everdeen, and he knows that everyone else in the Hunger Games will come up against her, and they will break.

 

 

The only thing he is unsure of is if _she_ knows.

 

 

He can read her eyes now, and one look at them past Prim’s flailing limbs tells him she is _terrified_.

 

 

He knows better. _“Up you go, Catnip.”_

 

**Author's Note:**

> I read the Hunger Games last week, on Monday. I promised myself no fic until I’d seen the movie – it’s not often I get to compare my head canon with a movie canon so soon after digesting it, and I wanted to experiment a little. 
> 
> As expected, I still ship Gale/Katniss, as I have since the word go. 
> 
> It’s been a long time since I wrote my last story – it burned me out pretty badly. So, back up on the saddle with a pairing the world has promised me I’ll hate if I keep reading the books. Perhaps I just won’t. 
> 
> Either way, title is from _eighteen_ , in John Law’s poetry anthology _In Love Is An Expensive Place To Die_. The full poem goes as follows; _You came to me too quickly, like tomorrow./Your nearness is as real as yesterday./The touch of you is as sensitive as sorrow./And forever is quietly how you'll stay._
> 
> If you’ve read the book, there’s less to warn about here than there (ie: there is no visceral death here, but the threat of a child-murderpalooza, sexual extortion and oppression on a grand scale is all good and dandy.)


End file.
